A tattoo artist traditionally earns the title by completing an apprenticeship under strict guidelines from an experienced senior tattoo artist. Apprentices are generally expected to be excellent at drawing, with an ability to excel at customising design ideas and genres, as well as various other styles of art in general. Tattoo artists can create original tattoo designs for their customers. Tattooists may use flash (pre-drawn, stock images that can be traced onto the skin) or variations of known designs.
Many tattoos serve as rites of passage, marks of status and rank, symbols of religious and spiritual devotion, decorations for bravery, sexual lures and marks of fertility, pledges of love, amulets and talismans, protection, and as punishment, like the marks of outcasts, slaves and convicts. The symbolism and impact of tattoos varies in different places and cultures. Tattoos may show how a person feels about a relative (commonly mother/father or daughter/son) or about an unrelated person.
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Ancient tattooing was most widely practiced among the Austronesian people. It was one of the early technologies developed by the Proto-Austronesians in Taiwan and coastal South China prior to at least 1500 BCE, before the Austronesian expansion into the islands of the Indo-Pacific. It may have originally been associated with headhunting. Tattooing traditions, including facial tattooing, can be found among all Austronesian subgroups, including Taiwanese Aborigines, Islander Southeast Asians, Micronesians, Polynesians, and the Malagasy people. Austronesians used the characteristic hafted skin-puncturing technique, using a small mallet and a piercing implement made from Citrus thorns, fish bone, bone, and oyster shells.
Whang-od started her tattoo works at the age of 15 that she learned from her father. She has been doing the batok, the traditional hand-tapped tattooing, to male headhunters who earned the tattoos by protecting villages or killing enemies. She also applies tattoos to women of the Butbut people in Buscalan, Kalinga primarily for aesthetic purposes. As a traditional Kalinga tattooist or mambabatok, she did fortune telling and chants while doing tattoos. Every design she created has symbolic meanings connected to it. For example, an eagle tattoo indicates that the warrior successfully killed an enemy upon his return from a battle.
Whang-od Oggay (First name pronunciation: [ˈɸɑŋ:ˈəd]; born February 17, 1917), also known as Maria Oggay, is a Filipina tattoo artist from Buscalan, Tinglayan, Kalinga, Philippines. She is often described as the “last” and oldest mambabatok (traditional Kalinga tattooist) and is part of the Butbut people of the larger Kalinga ethnic group. She has been tattooing headhunters and women of the indigenous people of Butbut in Buscalan, Kalinga since she was 15 years old but the Butbut warriors who used to earn tattoos through protecting villages or killing enemies no longer exist. Despite that, Whang-od continues to apply her traditional art form to tourists visiting Buscalan.
She herself was tattooed when she was a teenager and her first tattoo consists of a ladder and a python. Fatok is the term used for tattooing women to show beauty and wealth. When an arm of woman is tattooed just like Whang-od’s own tattoos, the family of the woman is obliged to pay the tattoo artist a piglet or bundle of harvested rice (locally called as dalan). On the other hand, fi-ing is the term used for tattooing of male Butbut warriors on their chests and arms. Whang-od used to practice fi-ing until headhunting was discouraged by the government. Fi-ing was last practiced in 1972.
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She has been tattooing headhunters and women of the indigenous people of Butbut in Buscalan, Kalinga since she was 15 years old but the Butbut warriors who used to earn tattoos through protecting villages or killing enemies no longer exist. Despite that, Whang-od continues to apply her traditional art form to tourists visiting Buscalan.
Watch the Documentary
ADRIAN GUILLERME & FEROCIOUS TATTOOSPRESENTS
The Documentary
Anger Manager is a full length documentary that sheds light to the dark corners of the New York underground tattoo and piercing scene, where bikers, skinheads, rockers, poll dancers and hard core art performers dwell. The documentary was shot in 2016, and features 16 interviews and more than 84 minutes of raw footage.
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